Shopify Unite Conference 2018: Shopify's brand new features revealed

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Yesterday’s Unite 2018 saw one of Shopify’s largest ever product and feature announcements - unveiling a huge suite of powerful new tools to make selling online faster, simpler and more effective.

The announcements illustrate the company’s enormous global ambition - to become the world’s premier platform for e-Commerce across a fast-moving, constantly changing international marketplace.

Features

It’s a huge announcement - in fact, some of the platforms most requested ever features, and most of them are set to be released this year. Some of our favourites are

Utilise Multiple Sales Channels

Shopify serves a global marketplace, and on the back of rapid international growth, are putting in place multilingual support for the product’s admin system. Starting with French, German, Japanese, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish, the beta programme is preparing to take the platform global - increasing it’s reach and service widely.

Distributed inventory locations

Managing inventory across multiple locations can be complex, time consuming and difficult to manage. With Locations, Shopify has announced powerful, in-built features to make managing multi-location inventory a breeze. Taking orders online and fulfilling them from disparate locations is exactly what this is for and it goes live this summer - and you can find out more here.

Custom discount introductions (buy-one, get-one free arrives)

Starting this week, merchants will have access to a collection of new custom discount features. In addition to bespoke discounts, Shopify have also finally announced BOGO - which can be combined with customer-specific targeting, allowing merchants to make the most of customer loyalty by rewarding their most frequent customers with targeted discounts. Find out more about configurable discounts here.

In-admin marketing campaigns

This summer, Shopify merchants will gain access to a brand new Marketing section of their store’s administration panel - dedicated specifically to creating, distributing, managing and measuring digital marketing activities directly from the Shopify admin panel. It’s designed to unify social, paid, e-mail and outreach campaigns to both streamline their administration and manage their effectiveness. In addition to that comes a series of personalised recommendations - presenting insight-led, intelligent opportunities to capitalise on the most effective outreach activities that have helped you sell more.

Global local payments

Released this coming Autumn, Shopify Payments is changing. Providing payment systems specifically tailored to a customer’s geography, customers will be presented with more convenient, familiar payment options than ever before - making selling to a global marketplace as frictionless as possible. These new systems include integration with WeChatPay, Alipay and Sofort - serving both Asian and European markets with familiar options that customers already use.

Fraud protection for Shopify Payments

This might sound like an obvious one, but make sure that when you offer a discount, the user knows they're actually getting one! You need to show the comparative price for this to sink in, there's no benefit to changing the price of a product if the customer doesn't know how much they will save.

Create A Specific Landing Page

Shopify Payments is about to get smart on fraud management. Introducing Fraud Protect for Shopify Payments, enabling it will mean that Shopify will analyze each eligible order for fraud, and provide an instant protect decision. This means that instead of manually reviewing orders, stores using Fraud Protect can confidently fulfill all protected orders without having to think about managing fraud - eliminating a huge part of the order fulfilment process. It’s coming first for the US, and then for everyone else.

Shopify Ping: Chat-based management systems

Shopify Ping is arriving this summer - and the team are on a mission to make using your smartphone to manage your store simpler and faster than ever before. Shopify Ping is designed to aggregate all of your separate messaging platforms into one centralised space for interacting with your customers, managing marketing activities and interacting with Kit, Shopify’s intelligent virtual personal assistant.

The brand new app store

In addition to Shopify’s native features, there’s a rich ecosystem of apps and extensions designed to solve specific, real-world cases for merchants that need to achieve things that aren’t possible using out-of-the-box features. Shopify have announced a brand-new app store designed to make the path to the perfect app clearer and quicker. As well as personalised recommendations and improved listings, the store, coming this summer, uses a new categorisation system to organise it’s inventory clearly and minimally.

New retail products and features

Shopify isn’t just an online sales platform. A large part of the company’s expertise leans into the retail space, with an aim to reconcile the physical with the digital across an omni-channel platform. With that in mind, there’s a host of new retail products designed to help merchants simplify their administrative systems, including a tap and chip reader to collect payments at the point of sale. It rolls out in the US in the autumn and represents the next stage in Shopify’s multi-channel sales service.

API in overdrive

Often, the only way to deliver a completely custom sales experience means wrangling Shopify’s API to access its powerful internals in a way that deliver a fully or partially bespoke experience. Without getting into all of the specifics here, what you need to know is that Shopify’s API has been rewritten on GraphQL to make it unbelievably fast and incredibly performant. Particularly for developers, this means that it’s simpler than ever to expose Shopify’s powerful engine for the benefit of the customer and provide unique visual and interactive experiences.

Summary

There’s never been a better time to explore the benefits of Shopify for your business - regardless of what you sell, or how much of it. At BAO, we’re experts in strategic e-Commerce design and development and specialise in making sure your digital solutions work as hard for you as they can. Get in touch today to find out how we can help.